Combat Missions

A combat mission is the most reliable fight in the game: you accept it from the Port Quests board while docked, a battle marker appears on the map near your port, and when you sail to it you drop into an instanced fight against a generated NPC fleet — one whose size you chose when you took the mission. Because you set the difficulty and the battle sits in friendly water waiting for you, missions are the safest and most repeatable way to earn reals and experience, level up a new ship, and practise gunnery without a thinking enemy shooting back. They are where most captains spend their first dozen hours.

Where missions come from

Missions are handed out at the Port Quests screen, one of the port activities covered in Port UI. Open it in any port and you’ll find the work available to you sorted into kinds — ordinary combat missions, larger operations, and time-limited events — alongside the Journal that tracks what you’ve already taken. You can hold several missions at once, up to a cap, so it’s normal to stack a few before you sail. Taking, abandoning, and turning in missions all happen in port; out at sea the board is read-only.

Choosing the fight

The point of a combat mission is that you set the terms. When you pick one up you choose how hard it should be — broadly, what rate of enemy and how large a fleet you’ll face. A cautious captain takes a mission scaled to a ship they can comfortably beat; an ambitious one takes a tougher fleet for a bigger payout and more experience, accepting the risk. Match the mission to the ship you’re actually sailing rather than the one you wish you had: an over-ambitious mission in an under-gunned hull is how new captains lose ships they couldn’t replace.

Running the mission

Accepting a mission plants a marker in the open world, usually within reach of the port you took it from. Sail to it and the entry point opens the battle instance; the same Rules of Engagement that govern every fight apply here too, but a mission battle is generally yours — it isn’t open for other players to wander into the way an open-sea tag is. Inside, you fight the generated fleet until it’s sunk or captured; do that and the mission completes. You can bring fleet ships of your own to even the odds, and you can choose to board and capture an enemy rather than sink it — useful early on, when a captured hull is worth more to you than the extra experience sinking would give.

Rewards and how you claim them

Finishing a mission pays out in some mix of reals, doubloons, experience, and chests — see Loki Runes, Chests & Journal for what chests contain and Currencies for what the two coins are good for. The experience is what raises your rank, which in turn unlocks bigger ships and more demanding missions, so the early grind compounds. Many rewards aren’t handed to you on the spot — they’re deposited into your Reward Chest, which you open back at one of your outposts. Plan to return to a port where you have an outpost to actually collect what you’ve earned.

Beyond the mission board

Combat missions are the floor, not the ceiling. When the fixed fights start to feel routine, the open-ended hunt and delivery missions let you earn while you roam, the daily patrol zones and events offer richer rewards against real opponents, and the various types of battle open up as you grow confident. Missions are simply the safest rung on that ladder — the place to build the ship, the bankroll, and the skill that the rest of the game then asks of you.